Obama on fiscal cliff: If this shooting has done anything, it should give us some perspective on what’s important

posted at 3:31 pm on December 19, 2012 by Allahpundit

Like I told you yesterday, the big gun-control push isn’t really about gun control. He knows he has no chance of getting anything but the most modest new regulations through the House, and even that’s unlikely. This is about maximizing his leverage against Republicans on other issues by framing them, as usual, as people who just don’t care enough about Americans generally and children in particular.

So here he is at today’s presser announcing the latest bureaucratic bulwark against gun violence, casually wondering how the GOP can be so obstinate and narrow-minded as to stick to their principles At A Time Like This.

OBAMA: There is no doubt that, you know, the speaker has challenges in his caucus, and I recognize that. I’m often reminded when I speak to the Republican leadership that the majority of their caucus’s membership come from districts that I lost. And so, sometimes they may not see an incentive in cooperating with me in part because they’re more concerned about challenges from a tea party candidate or challenges from the right. And, you know, cooperating with me may make them vulnerable.

You know, I recognize that. But, goodness, if — if this past week has done anything, it should just give us some perspective. If there’s one thing we should have after this week, it should be a sense of perspective about what’s important.

And, you know, I would like to think that members of that — that caucus would say to themselves, “You know what? We disagree with the president on a whole bunch of things. We wish the other guy had won. We’re going to fight him on a whole range of issues over the next four years. We think his philosophy is all screwed up.”

“But, right now what the country needs is for us to compromise, get a deficit reduction deal in place, make sure middle class taxes don’t go up, make sure that we’re laying the foundations for growth, give certainty to businesses large and small, not put ourselves through some sort of self-inflicted crisis every six months. Allow ourselves time to focus on things like preventing the tragedy in Newtown from happening again. Focus on issues like energy, and immigration reform and, you know, all the things that will really make a determination as to whether or not our country grows over — over the next four years, 10 years, 40 years.”

What kind of hyperpartisan conservative monster insists on spending time negotiating the economic policy that’s going to govern the country next year when we could be commiserating about high-capacity magazines instead? Note the boldfaced bit, too. The if-Sandy-Hook-means-anything ploy isn’t limited to pressuring Republicans on the fiscal cliff; he’s already got his eye on amnesty and lord knows what else. The NYT makes a good point in its story this morning about O’s second term, though: How many hot-button issues can he tackle before his political capital begins to deplete and vulnerable Democrats start to panic? There are a huge number of Dem senators whose seats are up in 2014; they can probably pass amnesty without too much worry, as they’ll have cover from Republicans who are worried about electoral demographics, but can they get away with a serious gun-grab push on top of that? At the very least, the big amnesty fight will have to be postponed for a bit. They were planning to go straight at that in January, but public support for gun-grabbing after a mass shooting is ephemeral. O will have to push that first, before the national attention span drifts elsewhere, and then pick up immigration.

Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit and Byron York is right that Obama’s new blue-ribbon panel on gun violence is just a way of punting on that issue while pretending to do something. I’m skeptical — he’s already invested too much rhetorically in the Do Something response to Sandy Hook to disappoint the left by doing nothing — but it’s certainly true that he wouldn’t have bothered with this subject if not for the news last Friday. Any policy that comes out of it will be meager relative to the political risks involved, but he has some political capital to spend right now and he owes his base big time for delivering for him in November so he has to Do Something to prove that he cares. And if, in the course of doing it, he can put Boehner and McConnell on the spot by forcing them to oppose an ambitious Democratic overreach on guns, so much the better for him.

Via Mediaite, here’s Jake Tapper wondering why President Do Something did nothing for the past four years. The honest truth: Because he cared a lot more about being reelected than tackling gun-control measures that might have imperiled his chances in purple states. When push came to shove, winning was more important than Doing Something. And don’t think the left, which has spent the last five days lecturing gun-rights advocates about priorities and callousness, didn’t back him on that all the way.

Blowback

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Jake Tapper wondering why President Do Something did nothing for the past four years. The honest truth: Because he cared a lot more about being reelected than tackling gun-control measures that might have imperiled his chances in purple states. When push came to shove, winning was more important than Doing Something.

This mans heart is a blackened carbon brick. Oops! Is that racist libs?

Seriously, what kind of a human being uses dead children to scare the public about guns, raise campaign funds and to push tax increases in within a week? I can’t believe this POS is our President. Another stain on this great nations history. 2016 can’t come soon enough.

I’m looking forward to the press conference where Obama says, “In the spirit of compromise, I’ve offered the Speaker of the House a deal I know his caucus will pass and it consists of 3-1 cuts over taxes, tax cuts for everyone up to 1 million dollars and no increase in spending.” “I’ve also promised that I will have a budget, that will pass the House and urge Senator Reid to do one also and we’ll go through the reconciliation process and start to get our country on a firm financial footing.” Of course, I’m not holding my breath waiting for that, but he certainly didn’t mean what he said, to include himself.

Yeah, what’s important is giving Obamuh carte blanche, letting him have all the power and all the money he wants and to let him spend–squander–as much as he wants on whatever he wants. Today he was just condescending and insulting to all Americans–even the deadbeat low-information knuckleheads who are too stupid to realize they’re being insulted.

How many hot-button issues can he tackle before his political capital begins to deplete and vulnerable Democrats start to panic? There are a huge number of Dem senators whose seats are up in 2014; …

….but can they get away with a serious gun-grab push on top of that?

Seeing the reaction from Conservative supporters of Liberty and the basement level lies from the Oppressive-left, I’d guess that he’s not going to get very far.

The Moro… Low information voters are going to quickly get distracted onto other issues soon enough – unless there is another mass shooting as a result of insane leftist-oppressive disarmament polices that is.

Do we think that the Obama administration and the media have sufficiently distracted us from issues like the HHS mandate, Benghazi hearings, the FISCAL CLIFF, Obamacare, rising unemployment, who will take key cabinet positions, etc, with this ‘discussion’ about breaching the Second Amendment?

So here he is at today’s presser announcing the latest bureaucratic bulwark against gun violence, casually wondering how the GOP can be so obstinate and narrow-minded as to stick to their principles At A Time Like This.

What an absolute tool. Turning the deaths of 26 people into a partisan issue rallying cry on the fiscal cliff? And I love the whole idea that they should cast aside the interests of their districts in service to HIS agenda.

Four Americans were murdered in Benghazi. Over forty thousand are dead in Syria. Soon, it will be four million dead as a result of the hidden agenda of our elected leaders, the complicity of a corrupt media, and the complacency of a brainwashed public. Today we cry over the deaths in Newtown, but tomorrow, our sobs will be for the masses.

I can’t believe this POS is our President.
jawkneemusic on December 19, 2012 at 3:46 PM

no kidding! Wouldn’t hold a presser for months, only showed up on afternon entertainment crap and Letterman during the run up to the election and now he’s mobilizing on the narrative he tried to create with F&F and is getting gun control, tax hikes and enormous spending acomplished all at once!

Block everything he is doing with all you have GOP!! DO NOT NEGOTIATE ANY LONGER!!! You are out of their league and things need to play out. He owns this and he needs to take the blame for it.

The honest truth: Because he cared a lot more about being reelected than tackling gun-control measures that might have imperiled his chances in purple states. When push came to shove, winning was more important than Doing Something. And don’t think the left, which has spent the last five days lecturing gun-rights advocates about priorities and callousness, didn’t back him on that all the way.

May all the hypocritical thugs spontaneously combust every time they pontificate, starting with him and Bloomberg, ending with the HA leftards. To Hades with y’all.

Yes. A new ‘redistribution’. That report was an attempt to ‘redistribute’ the blame and responsibility for what led up to the Benghazi attack, why Stevens was there at all, and the pathetic ‘response’ ( if we call no response at all, then blaming a You Tube video that no one had seen and lying and obfuscating continually throughout a response)so that it was no focused where it belongs, on H.R. Clinton, Secretary of State, but spread as widely as possible over the entire State Department, thus protecting everyone except the ‘expendable’ lower echelon employees who were forced to fall on their swords and resign.

The Arab Spring has unleashed instability and destruction in the middle east and, if not contained, the West as well. Obama and the progressives are largely responsible.

I wonder how the media would’ve reacted if Boehner had come to a mic today and proclaimed that Obama and the Dems should extend the tax cuts and produce a surplus-generating debt-reducing budget, by the end of the month – in the name of “what’s important, given the context of the Conneticut shootings”, “in the name of the children”, or some other similar comment casting it in the context of those dead kids and adults (lets not forget that several adults were also murdered)?

We know they’d be on fire denouncing such a craven political act – and they’d be right to do so.

So, jobs, healthcare, economy, streamlining government, transparency, Gitnmo, the many wars he has initiated are all on the back burner now because some nutbag steals a gun and shoots people. Priorities.

The main thing was that he showed he was for action. Doesn’t matter what action or whether said action will help or hurt. Being for action shows how much he cares. And caring is the main thing.

Since his opponents refuse to “take action” they are automatically evil, despicable sub humans who are responsible for the deaths of children everywhere.

I am sick of him and of every liberal out there and their moral superiority schtick. Because they don’t care. They just want the fastest, easiest fix that will allow themselves to continue to tell each other how very much they care and what morally superior beings they are. Even if nothing is fixed at all.

There’s always some big emergency that has to be handled rather than doing the mundane things like passing a budget, figuring out how to pay down the debt, keeping our ambassadors from being murdered, putting people who threaten voters with clubs in jail, or keeping drug dealers and terrorists from walking across our borders. It’s much more important to pass some huge national health care monstrosity nobody wants, or solving an imaginary global temperature increase, or keeping spoiled ivy-league law school students supplied with contraceptives, or putting back in place a federal law that was such a complete failure at both the national and state level that even a Democrat congress wouldn’t renew it. If President Do-Something thought gun crime was such a big problem that we have to drop everything else NOW, then why is prosecution of gun crime cases by his DOJ 60% of what it was under Bush?

I am sick of him and of every liberal out there and their moral superiority schtick. Because they don’t care. They just want the fastest, easiest fix that will allow themselves to continue to tell each other how very much they care and what morally superior beings they are. Even if nothing is fixed at all.

But you, you care so much, it hurts. You care so much you log on to Hot Air and post your self congratulatory drivel. Puke.

Yes. But this is a pheonomenon widely afflicting the commentariat, and historically it occurs in many societies drifting toward tyranny. That is, few among this group are able to withstand the socially enveloping hallucinogen of the “new normal” according to how power wishes it to be defined. To resist it requires a morally alert outrage based on simultaneous detachment and a profound love for freedom. What Obama has done and is doing is so far off the charts of normality or moral reckoning for most people (psychologists call it “the scope of sensitivity”) that to account for it honestly can be very hard. It is so much easier to couch it familiar terms as “just politics.” To reckon honestly with the abomination of Obama in every respect is grueling and after awhile runs the risk of making you look hysterical — especially in a culture whose main outlets of respectable news gathering and reporting are essentially spokespersons for this grotesque new normal.

Obama is a political and moral obscenity almost beyond description. He is so far off the metrics of what we know, it is almost like he has found sanctuary in the realm of the unimaginable.

Hahaha, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? The big Oaf is the best BS’er our nation has ever had for a president. You can just see him bristle when someone asks him a tough question, and his immediate response is to get defensive and talk about what a busy man he’s been, fixing this, fixing that. That fact of the matter is, though, that he hasn’t fixed the economy. The military is fighting the war. Congress is responsible for passing the health care boondoggle, and he’s about to kick the can down the road once again on coming up with a plan to lower the deficit and focus on gun control. He tried 3 times to pass a budget that no one voted for! It’s not just WHERE HAS HE BEEN, it’s WHAT HAS HE DONE?

I can’t help but think that if the Tapper question was asked of Bush we would be worried that the world might find out OUR Republican President has been busy playing politics and strengthening his own party’s hold on government instead of taking care of the nation’s business like unemployment. I can imagine the commenters here posting that the President better quit grandstanding when he hasn’t done anything to help with the major problems but make excuses. It is the fact you can go to the MSM or left wing blogs and see no fear that the country could turn on this kind of leadership that frightens me we have no future that looks bright.

It’s not that he only cares about white kids. It’s that the left wing mass media are only interested in violence where the perpetrators are white – or in cases like the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, where they mistakenly assume that the killer is white. Then they go crazy pushing Anti-White Narrative #1: Evil White Males.

But if the killer is black, like Omar Thornton, they like Anti-White Narrative #2: the victims might have been racist, or anyway they can’t talk back now so we’ll suggest that they were, in which case they had it coming. But more often they prefer to bury the story altogether.

The left wing mass media are the problem. Repeal the Hollywood tax cuts.